Visual Poetry: Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood
Inspired by William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Akira Kurosawa created, with Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jo, Japan, 1957), visual poetry: in black and…
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Toshiro Mifune – Intense acting and inventive spirit
When I began working on Akira Kurosawa, the pivotal role for his cinema of Toshiro Mifune (b. 1 April 1920…
The she-panther and the yakuza in Drunken Angel
Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi, 1948) is Akira Kurosawa’s first film in which music, used at both a diegetic and non-diegetic…
Discover Kurosawa’s forgotten film about nuclear terror during the Cold War
Since the success of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon at the International Film Festival in Venice in 1951 – which opened the…
Discover this generation-spanning drama about cultural change in post-war Japan
In Mikio Naruse’s 1956 film A Wife’s Heart, the family serves as a microcosm for tradition and changes in post-war Japanese society….
Thousand Words: Kikuchiyo, The Seventh Samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954)
A man scowling while other onlookers appear behind him then pushing his way through the crowd in order to have…
Thousand Words: Evil Behind the Mask of Respectability (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960)
The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru), a critical portrayal of postwar corporate Japan as a breeding ground…
Four Frames: Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)
Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi, 1948) paints a gloomy portrait of post-war Tokyo, a city in ruins where crime, corruption and…
Thousand Words: Affirming Human Dignity (Samurai Rebellion, 1967)
Masaki Kobayashi’s whole oeuvre is marked by his lifelong preoccupation with the complex relationship between the individual and society, the…
